Texas Instruments Demonstrates World’s First 2-lb Projectors

Photonics.comJun 2001
DALLAS, June 15 -- Texas Instruments (TI) demonstrated an advance in projector technology at the Infocomm tradeshow (booth 20081). On public show for the first time were projectors weighing just 2 lbs (0.9 kg) – 30 percent lighter than the world’s previous lightest projectors. Designed and manufactured by PLUS Vision Corp., the V-1080SF projector delivers 800 lumens of brightness at XGA resolution while the V-807SF features 700 lumens at SVGA resolution.
According to Stanford Resources Inc., an iSuppli Company, the overall projection market will double in size by 2006. The market for microportable projectors – those weighing 5 lbs or less – is expected to grow even more rapidly, while Stanford Resources believes that the market for projectors weighing 3lbs or less will grow from shipments of 30,000 units in 2000 to
1.2 million units in 2006. Today, almost all projectors weighing less than 5 lbs - and all projectors weighing less than 3 lbs - are enabled by Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology.
At the heart of TI's DLP technology is the Digital Micromirror Device optical semiconductor chip. The DMD switch has an array of up to 1,310,000 hinged, microscopic mirrors which operate as optical switches to create a high resolution, full color image.